King of the Hill will bring the Hill family back to Arlen, Texas, when Season 14 revival premieres next month, and they’ll be bringing a few new faces (and celebrity guest stars) with them.
IndieWire shared the new cast lineup today, teasing five additional guest stars that will play new and recast characters from the show’s original run. Each actor joins a list of other changes to the Mike Judge and Greg Daniels show as it aims to bring Hank, Peggy, and Bobby into current-day Arlen.
Topping the list of the new King of the Hill cast is Keith David (The Princess and the Frog, The Thing), who will be playing a new character by the name of Brian Robertson. The site describes Brian as the individual renting the Hill home during the time-jump that occurs between Season 13 and Season 14. There’s also Anthony ‘Critic’ Campos (Idiocracy, Harsh Times), who has been tapped to play a chef named Emilio. Viewers can catch him working alongside Bobby at the Robata Chane in Dallas.
Time has passed for the King of the Hill crew, and it’s passed for everyone in the real world, too. With the leap to the future comes recasts for Ted Wassanasong, Chane Wassanasong, and Joseph Gribble. Kenneth Choi (The Wolf of Wall Street, Spider-Man Homecoming) will take over for Toby Huss as Laotian businessman Ted, with Ki Hong Lee (The Maze Runner, Wish Upon) picking up the role of his son, Chane, from Pamela Adlon.
The father-son duo will team up with Bobby, with Ted serving as a financial backer for Robata Chane while Chane aids as a business partner. Dale and Nancy Gribble’s grown-up son, Joseph Gribble, meanwhile, will no longer be voiced by Breckin Meyer, with writer and comedian Tai Leclaire (Headdress, Super Team Canada) picking up the role in his place.
“After years working a propane job in Saudi Arabia to earn their retirement nest egg,” an official description says, “Hank and Peggy Hill return to a changed Arlen, Texas to reconnect with old friends Dale, Boomhauer and Bill. Meanwhile, Bobby is living his dream as a chef in Dallas and enjoying his 20s with his former classmates Connie, Joseph, and Chane.”
King of the Hill Season 14 will take fans’ favorite propane-fueled family back to Arlen (and to Hulu) when it hits its August 4, 2025, release date. As the classic animated show pivots with new voice talent for roles that have been described by many as miscast in the past, it will also feature posthumous credits for some of its most memorable characters. These include Dale actor Johnny Hardwick, who managed to complete work on a few episodes before his death in 2023, and Jonathan Joss, who passed away just last month.
Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He's best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).
Bethesda has broken its silence on the future of Starfield, insisting it’s still working on updates and will share details on the “exciting things” it has planned in the coming months.
The Starfield community had hoped Bethesda would announce something to do with the game at its show, but while The Elder Scrolls Online and Fallout 76 both got their moment in the spotlight, Starfield skipped proceedings entirely. No DLC, no expansion, no PlayStation 5 release… nothing.
Now, ahead of Gamescom in August, Bethesda has piped up with a statement on Steam that is as brief as it is vague, but at least addresses Starfield’s future and promises more content is in the works.
“Looking ahead, we’re continuing work on future updates and will share more about the exciting things we have planned for Starfield in the coming months,” Bethesda said in a post accompanying Starfield Update 1.15.222, which is in beta form on Steam. Patch notes are below.
Starfield players are hoping this means the promised second Starfield expansion is still coming, and that Starfield may follow the likes of Forza Horizon 5 and make the jump to PlayStation 5.
Starfield launched in September 2023 as Bethesda’s first brand new IP in 25 years, but it was not as well received as the studio’s previous games in the Fallout and The Elder Scrolls franchises, and the Shattered Space expansion, released a year later in September 2024, has a ‘mostly negative’ user review rating on Steam.
Starfield went on to reach 15 million players, but the question of whether Bethesda might walk away from the game to focus on its other franchises has been a running theme since release. In June 2024, Bethesda insisted it remained committed to supporting Starfield, and confirmed at least one other story expansion would release following Shattered Space. And in an interview with YouTube channel MrMattyPlays, Bethesda Game Studios’ Todd Howard said the developer was aiming to release an annual story expansion for “hopefully a very long time.”
Minor improvements to format and display in Creations menus.
Addressed an issue that could cause that Extreme Temperature gear to appear incorrectly.
Minor improvements to sorting in the Missions Menu.
General crash and stability fixes.
This update is currently in Steam Beta. If you would like to opt in to the Starfield Beta update, please follow these instructions:
Open your Steam Library and navigate to Starfield
Right click on "Starfield" and select "Properties"
In the new properties pop-up window, select "Betas"
In the beta drop down to opt into, select "[beta]"
Wait for app to download new build and launch
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
And on top of all that, it apparently earned $200 million in a single day - the same amount that Magic's Lord of the Rings set earned in six months.
This is according to Hasbro in its Q2 earnings call, which revealed the figure alongside a report that Magic: The Gathering revenue grew 23% year-over-year in large part thanks to the Final Fantasy release. Per CEO Chris Cox, it brought in more new players in stores over two weeks than any other set has in 12 weeks. And in the investor Q&A during the earnings call, Cox answered a question about how Final Fantasy's demand correlated to the company's expectations with the following quote (courtesy of Investing.com's transcript):
In terms of Final Fantasy and how it met expectations, I’ll give you a comparison between two of our biggest universe at the onsets. Lord of the Rings took six months to deliver $200,000,000 of revenue.
Final Fantasy took one day. And we left demand on the table. So we couldn’t produce enough. I think we increased production runs on it four times pre release. It was substantially, by many, many very high double digit percentages, ahead of any other production run we’ve ever done.
And we left the market wanting more. And our expectation is there’s going to be a nice long tail of backlist for the product. Likewise, we’re still selling Lord of the Rings product today. So, even though we hit $200,000,000 in December ’2 for Lord of the Rings, We sold a substantial percentage of that in the several years following. We expect Final Fantasy to be no different.
It’s partially what’s powering our backlist, which already in five and a half months in the year did more than we’ve ever done in any year prior. So, I think that’s a little bit on what our bullishness is on Final Fantasy. What drove success for it? I think it’s a couple of things. I think first and foremost, it’s finding the right IPs that are great adjacencies to what Magic fans might appeal to or what Magic might appeal to another fan base.
Lord of the Rings was fantastic because it’s kind of the granddaddy of fantasy. It invented the genre, major books, major movies, major animation and games. Final Fantasy, I think, is almost as strong as Lord of the Rings in terms of IP strength, if not stronger in some regions. I think it has stronger cross regional appeal, and it has probably more of a sweet spot in gaming than Lord of the Rings has, because it was kind of born from gaming. So, I think potentially the overlap of fan bases was stronger than you might have even seen for something like Lord of the Rings.
In a follow-up question, Cox also noted that he feels "pretty good" about future collaborations and first-party sets coming next year "in terms of being Final Fantasy like in terms of the types of players, the size of community, and the adjacencies we have."
That last remark bodes well for fans of the Final Fantasy set. We just saw a Sonic: The Hedgehog Secret Lair crossover debut, and already know about Spider-Man and Avatar: The Last Airbender themed sets in September and November, respectively, so with success like this, more crossovers are likely to make sense to the folks at Hasbro. In the meantime, at least this means Hasbro will keep the Final Fantasy cards stocked for a good while, for those who haven't been able to get their hands on them yet.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
One of the biggest incentives to shop directly through LEGO is their awesome Free Gift With Purchase deal. These are offered through a couple of different routes and vary depending on the gift, but are great little additions if you planned to get particular sets anyway. Sometimes you'd have to spend a qualifying amount to get the free gift, but here all you have to do is purchase the LEGO Botanicals Flower Arrangement (#10345) online. Do that, and the Field Flowers free gift is yours!
Gifts with purchase are only available to LEGO Insiders members, which is free to join.
Get LEGO Field Flowers For Free
The LEGO Field Flowers set is made up of 77 pieces, so it's an extremely quick build. It comes in a bag instead of a box, so it's nice and small and will likely fit in your mailbox. It makes clever use of clear studs to achieve the transparent look of a dandelion clock, and its thin stem gives it an added layer of accurate detail. The LEGO Botanical Collection is one of their most popular lines for adults, and they make great decoration for bookshelves and mantels. I have the LEGO Flower Bouquet next to my TV in a real glass vase, and it looks great. In fact, all of these LEGO plant and flowers do. The Field Flowers free gift is a great way to add onto an already vibrant and colorful display. IGN's Hannah Hoolihan built the LEGO Japanese Red Maple Tree set most recently, and the colors really pop.
More LEGO Plants and Flowers
There are a handful of LEGO plants and flowers to pick from, and they make great gifts. The Tiny Plants set (#10329) is perfect for succulent lovers. It comes with nine separate builds, so you can spread them around for display. The Bouquet of Roses (#10328) is super detailed and is generally a great gift idea for any occasion.
Alienware released a new flagship gaming laptop this year - the Area-51 - and it brings to the table a host of upgrades over the m-series laptops including a sleeker redesign, current generation components, and better cooling potential. As part of the Dell Back to School Sale, several Alienware Area-51 gaming laptops have dropped to the lowest prices I've seen this year. They're all equipped with the newest Intel Core Ultra 9 processors and Nvidia RTX 5000 series Blackwell graphics cards. Check out all of the deals below.
Alienware Area-51 Laptops on Sale for Back to School
The Area-51: Curvy Design, More Power, Better Cooling
New for 2025, the Alienware Area-51 gaming laptop features a magnesium alloy chassis with upgraded cooling to tackle the latest and greatest heat generating components. This includes more fans and bigger cutouts enabling greater airflow, more generous use of copper, and a new thermal interface material to better transfer heat away from the core components. Dell claims that the laptop can handle a higher power ceiling of up to 240W TDP without raising acoustics.
Design-wise, the Area 51 accentuates its smooth contours, with rounded edges and soft corners replacing the squared off design you'd see in most other laptops. The hinges are also mostly internally positioned so that they're near invisible. As befits an Alienware laptop, there are ample customization options for RGB LED lighting.
The Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX is a top performing CPU
The Area-51 laptop is also equipped with a very powerful CPU as well. The Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX boasts a max turbo frequency of 5.4GHz with a whopping 24 cores and 40MB total L2 cache. According to Passmark, this is the second most powerful Intel mobile CPU available right now and goes head to head with AMD's Ryzen 9 7945HX3D.
The RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5080 mobile offer the best performance for your dollar
As expensive as these laptops are, you don't want to spend even more on trivial upgrades. The RTX 5070 Ti mobile GPU boasts performance on par with the RTX 4080 but with the added benefit of faster GDDR7 RAM and DLSS 4.0. The RTX 5080 mobile GPU represents a healthy improvement over the RTX 5070 Ti for a nominal price bump; it's about 15%-20% more powerful than the RTX 5070 Ti and the RTX 4080 that it replaces. It also happens to be about 5% more powerful than the RTX 4090 and has the same amount of memory (16GB). Unfortunately, the RTX 5090 only appears to be just 5% more powerful than the RTX 5080, and its only real benefit is the 24GB of memory, which isn't that useful for gaming (but is an attraction option for professionals who work with AI applications).
Check Out More Alienware Back to School Deals
Check out our Best Alienware Deals article with all of Dell's currently ongoing deals on gaming laptops and desktop PCs. Not everyone is the DIY type. If you're in the market for a prebuilt gaming PC, Dell is one of the best brands we'd recommend. Alienware desktops and laptops feature solid build quality, top-of-the-line gaming performance, excellent cooling (further improved on the newer models), aggressive styling, and pricing that is very competitive with other pre-built options. Best of all, there are plenty of sales that happen throughout the year, so it's not difficult to grab one of these computers at considerably less than their retail price.
Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn't hunting for deals for other people at work, he's hunting for deals for himself during his free time.
It’s encouraging news for DC Universe TV show Booster Gold, which is reportedly set for a pilot for HBO Max. However, it’s unclear whether this will result in a full series getting the green light.
Now, though, we have news from Deadline that HBO Max has Our Flag Means Death creator David Jenkins writing a pilot. “If taken to series,” Deadline continued, “we understand the plan is for Jenkins to show-run.”
That’s a big “if.” Gunn has made it clear that DC Studios will not progress with the production of films or TV shows unless their scripts are finished and of a high enough quality. Will this Booster Gold pilot make the cut?
So, who is Booster Gold? When Gunn announced the DCU, he said the character “uses basic technology from the future to pretend to be a superhero in present day.” We have a Booster Gold explainer if you want to know about the character’s comic book origins.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Amazon is finally offering a 2TB PS5-compatible SSD for under $100, which I haven't seen for months. Right now you can pick up an Orico 2TB PCIe Gen 4 M.2 Solid State Drive for only $96.19 after you apply the 26% off coupon on the product page. This is a PS5-compatible SSD with speeds well above Sony's minimum recommendation of 5,600MB/s and the proper form factor to drop right into the PS5's drive bay. You'll need to add your own heatsink, but you can easily get a PS5-compatible heatsink for well under $10. The Orico brand isn't as immediately recognizable as Samsung or WD, but this drive in particular has racked up enough positive feedback for me to feel comfortable recommending it.
Orico 2TB M.2 SSD (PS5-Compatible) for $96.19
The Orico e7400 SSD meets all the requirements for your PS5 upgrade. This is a PCIe Gen4 x4 SSD with an M.2 2280 form factor and transfer speeds of up to 7,400MB/s read and 6,600MB/s write which is well above the 5,600MB/s minimum threshold. It also makes an excellent boot drive for your gaming PC, especially with its 2TB storage capacity. Like most high-speed SSDs in this price range, the e7400 is a DRAM-less SSD that instead uses a combination of HMB technology and pseudo-SLC caching. Gamers shouldn't notice any performance difference either way.
The PS5 is an outstanding gaming console, but the 1TB SSD is a real bottleneck. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, for example, can exceed 200GB alone. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth tips the scales at 145GB and Baldur's Gate 3 requires 105GB. Future games like Grand Theft Auto VI will undoubtedly demand even more space. The advantage of a PS5 console over the Xbox Series X is that the SSD slot is not proprietary; you can install most third-party PCIe Gen4 x4 SSDs as long as they are fast enough. Slower drives will still work, but they may bottleneck the original SSD so they aren't recommended if you want an absolutely seamless experience.
Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn't hunting for deals for other people at work, he's hunting for deals for himself during his free time.
While we have put together lists recommending the best DC board games and Marvel board games on the market, there are still plenty of great titles out there that don't fall under either of those banners and instead highlight the "superhero" motif itself. These are games that pit players against one another as heroes and villains, and those that let you work together to stop some dastardly villains. This list takes a look at some of those games that will appeal to fans of capes and spandex, regardless of publisher.
TL;DR - These are the best superhero board games
If you don't have time to peruse the blurbs, you can see all the items on this list in the catalog above. But if you want more info about any of these superhero board games, read on for the info.
Kapow!
With art that looks like it was pulled straight out of a comic book, Kapow! from Wise Wizard Games has players filling the role of either heroes or villains as they duke it out in this dice-battling game, players roll a set of dice and then, by locking in different combinations of faces, trigger their respective hero or villain's signature skills and attacks. While on the surface this may sound similar to Dice Throne, one of the coolest features of Kapow! is its dice crafting mechanic, where you can create unique dice by inserting different symbols into the dice faces, helping to increase the odds of getting those rolls you want. Currently, there are two volumes of Kapow!, each containing six characters – three heroes and three villains – that can be mixed and matched together.
Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition
Sentinels of the Multiverse is a cooperative board game where teams of heroes struggle against a villain in an effort to thwart their dastardly plan of the week. Both the heroes and villains come with unique 40-card decks that show off the characters' various skills and play styles. One of the things that sets Sentinels apart is how the game also factors in the environment, with each environment also coming with its own deck and effects that further expand the game's replayability. To keep things manageable, players will only have to worry about their own hero's deck, with the "game" handling the villain and environment decks. With characters like Citizen Dead or the one-man-army, Militia, Sentinels of the Multiverse feels like a relic of early '90s comics, in all of the best ways.
Massive-Verse Fighting Card Game
Featuring characters from various Image Comics series including Radiant Black, the Massive-verse Fighting Card Game is a fast-paced 1v1 card game where two players choose from a roster of heroes, each with their own unique deck, and then proceed to attack, block, and hurl large ultimates at one another until only one is standing. Built on the backbone of Solis Game Studios' Pocket Paragon system, gameplay feels like a mix of the classic War card game and rock-paper-scissors, where both players play down their cards for the turn and then reveal them simultaneously, with some card types being able to counter others. The Massive-verse FCG is a great little game to keep in your car or bag to bust out when you have a few minutes of downtime and are in the mood for a quick brawl. If you want a bit more variety or to play with up to two more players, you can snag the game’s Team Up Expansion, which introduces four new character decks and 30 special team-up cards for 2v2 games.
Invincible: The Hero-Building Game
Invincible: The Hero-Building Game puts players in the superhero boots of the characters from the hit comic and animated series, Invincible. You can play as Atom Eve, Rex Splode, or Robot, and you and your friends are tasked with rescuing civilians, beating up minions, and stopping the big-bad of the day. Featuring a handful of scenarios, each with different goals to complete, this is a deck and bag-building game where you can level up and improve your hero as the game progresses. There's a push-your-luck aspect that comes into play by letting you fire off more of your powers – but draw too many black cubes, and you crash out and end your turn. The included scenarios can be played either as standalone games or strung together in order as a sort of campaign game. And if you're looking for additional challenge, you can pick from three difficulty levels – Easy, Normal, or Hardcore.
Astro Knights
Take up arms as an Astro Knight to defend your home planet in this cooperative deck-builder that has a unique twist – you don't shuffle your deck. More of a Guardians of the Galaxy approach to superheroes than Spider-Man or Superman, Astro Knights has a science fiction aesthetic, as you and your fellow knights build your decks, playing and equipping cards as you fight against the boss you are going up against. For fans of Aeon's End, this game will feel familiar, as it is a reimplementation of that game's systems.
Hellboy: The Board Game
Hellboy: The Board Game is a dungeon-crawling adventure where you and your friends move detailed minis of members of the BRPD like Hellboy, Abe Sapien, or Roger, as you work to solve different cases, taking down any bosses and enemies that get in your way. Each playable character comes with a set of skills and attacks that are unique to them, which you will need to use if you have any hope of succeeding in the game's included scenarios. Besides simply navigating around the modular board that you set up before each game, players also need to adjust on the fly as the Deck of Doom throws wrenches in your way at every turn, helping keep things exciting. This game can be played both as one-off sessions or as a strung-together campaign, and with a bunch of expansions released, there is plenty of Hellboy goodness out there for fans of the Dark Horse Comics series.
Scott White is a freelance contributor to IGN, assisting with tabletop games and guide coverage. Follow him on X/Twitter or Bluesky.
The South Park Season 27 premiere is set to go ahead tonight, July 23, after creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker signed a big money deal with Paramount.
The hotly contested new contract for South Park will see the long-running Comedy Central show continue even as Paramount works to get its merger with Skydance over the line.
Now, the new deal is official, which means the new season will debut on Comedy Central at 10pm ET / PT tonight, July 23. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the agreement runs for five years and includes 50 new episodes of the show to debut on Comedy Central. It is reportedly valued at $300 million a year, or $1.5 billion over the length of their contract, which makes South Park one of the most valuable franchises in television.
Meanwhile, the South Park library will move to Paramount+ in the U.S. and globally. New episodes will also stream on Paramount+ in the U.S. the day after they air on Comedy Central.
To celebrate the news, Matt Stone issued a standard comment thanking Paramount executives and expressing his excitement about the next five years. Parker, though, used the opportunity to issue a very intentional sports-cliche joke quote:
“We are grateful for this opportunity and deeply honored by the trust placed in us. This is about more than a contract — it’s about our commitment to this organization, our teammates, and our fans. We’re focused on building something special and doing whatever it takes to bring championships to this city.”
How can 50 episodes of South Park be valued at $1.5 billion? According to THR, the overall deal "also functioned as an advance on the streaming revenue, helping to explain the cost." Park County, Stone and Parker's South Park production company, gets about 50% of all streaming revenue, even though Paramount owns the show itself.
Photo by Vivien Killilea/Getty Images.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Remember Secret Level, that Amazon Prime miniseries of short films inspired by popular video games? You know the episode that recast Pac-Man as a marooned warrior abducting strangers to help it fight its way out of a prison planet? Well, Bandai Namco fleshed that idea out into a lengthy metroidvania called Shadow Labyrinth – a rare Street Fighter: The Movie-type beat – and this bizarre reimagining of the industry’s oldest eater is a truly challenging experience. Not necessarily because it’s difficult, as it’s not a cake walk but I’ve thrown myself against the rocks of more tortuous games in the past. No, my biggest struggle with it was staying interested in Shadow Labyrinth’s cryptic, slow, and frankly boring story while also fighting through some gnarly difficulty spikes and brutal checkpointing.
I’m not completely against the idea of a gritty reboot of Pac-Man in theory, but the execution here did not make a great case for it in practice. The story, which drapes you in the rags of Puck’s (read: Pac-Man’s) sword swinging goon, sort of exists around you. That makes some sense given you’ve woken up without any memories or understanding of the wreckage of war you’re being lead through by your scheming yellow companion, but Shadow Labyrinth’s insistence on making you stand around and watch broken, vague, trope-bloated dialogue between the handful of active characters is arduous.
The 10-minute Secret Level episode did a much more effective job of weaving an interesting parable by using the “cycle of survival” story as a parallel of the cyclical nature of Pac-Man’s eat-die-repeat gameplay. As a direct sequel to that short, Shadow Labyrinth expands on the story exponentially, but fills that new space with rote sci-fi lore that has very few compelling plot happenings sprinkled throughout. Even on the occasions where the journey of Puck and the Swordsman took big swerves, those twists came and went without much time spent considering their magnitude or potential consequences. I was always dungeon diving just like I would have been a few minutes later.
Shadow Labyrinth looks pretty good, though. The sort of moving paper doll animation used so well in games like Salt and Sanctuary is mostly solid here, too. There’s a surprising level of detail in many of the monsters, especially the mechanical ones with all of their bits and doodads. Animations can feel a little stilted and floaty, like a marionette on strings, but it doesn’t affect the action in any meaningful way. The levels themselves make good use of color in their fore and backgrounds, though I wouldn’t call its renditions of the depths of a lava filled cavern or the many stories of a high tech tower all that unique. There are disappointingly few locations that aren’t an underground cavern or high-tech base using similar backgrounds with the colors remixed. My favorite zone is the most interesting both in how it looks and how you have to navigate it, a valley filled with sometimes deadly flowers that is a completely optional and can’t be accessed until late.
It expands on its Prime Video prequel episode with dense sci-fi lore.
Unfortunately, the actual task of moving through these expansive areas takes far too long. Platforming never gets too out of hand, the bigger challenges are relegated to side paths occasionally leading to more dangerous mini-puzzles and obstacles that’ll test your timing and reflexes. I was regularly presented with rails that morph you into the round yellow chomp machine we all recognize. These tracks allow you to waka waka waka up designated walls, around corners, and across ceilings, munching on pellets (which is a currency to spend on perks and upgrades) as you go. Hopping from line to line or launching Puck at foes with a spinning sword attack is funny at first, but I can count on one hand the times I encountered sections of this that feels truly clever outside of the fact that the gimmick exists in the first place. They are such isolated experiences that if you removed all of these sections from Shadow Labyrinth, I wouldn’t miss any of them.
While on foot, obscure signposting and an abundance of crossroads often made it unclear where the critical path laid and I regularly stumbled into side paths by accident, which sometimes lead to goodies like bonus health and other times to roadblocks I didn’t have the upgrade to surmount. Sauntering around these corners was oppressively dangerous as death would jettison me back to a checkpoint that almost always felt miles away from where I fell. It was made more stressful because of the two-tiered checkpointing: the larger Miku Sol points that you can upgrade your warrior with and teleport between, and smaller pylons that are checkpoints in the strictest, old school sense of the word. As resources dwindled and the paths splintered and multiplied seemingly endlessly, a little misstep here or there could erase so much of my progress that I felt just as trapped in these places as Puck did. Maybe that's the point, they don’t like it and neither do I.
One thing I did really like were the MAZEs, little pocket dimensions that unlock about midway through the journey that pull you into chaotic versions of Pac-Man levels. You’re doing much more than zooming and eating in these, with various puzzly obstacles like moving walls that you essentially throw at enemy ghosts to make them edible. The flashy colors and arcade music provided a sort of Championship Edition DX energy that was a welcome reprieve from the mostly by-the-numbers dungeon delving I was undoubtedly doing before I approached their glowing headstones, and would return to as soon as they were over.
Combat is full of your standard fare for a game like this. You can dodge around and swing a sword in a basic combo from the start. You unlock a power attack that provides a large amount of ranged damage when used alone or can be linked to the end of your basic combo as a satisfying finisher. There’s an air dash, a grappling hook, a parry, and more all waiting to be found and added to your repertoire as well, each of which cost a little bit of your ESP gauge to use. Running that meter to empty puts you in a Street Fighter 6-style burnout condition, meaning you can’t do anything but attack until it recharges again. This is a heavy and meaningful penalty, one that asks you to really pay attention to how much offense you’re attempting to unload at once.
Meanwhile, perks can alter you in smaller ways, like making your dodge cost less ESP or showing the remaining health of the last enemy you hit. The most effective ones for me were those that make your special abilities stronger or allow Puck to passively gather bits for you. But while those are useful, none of these perks changed combat in significant ways or made the fact that I was just mashing attacks until everything died feel less repetitive.
Puck can get in on the action on occasion, combining with your swordsman to become a sort of mechanical dragon creature that rips and tears until its timed energy bar is done. It was fun to be big enough to ignore enemy damage and adverse terrain for a short period of time, but you are still largely just mashing the basic attack button until you can’t anymore. To recharge this mode, you have to devour fallen foes, which also give you various materials that can be spent at specific vendors for perks. I spent almost no time trying to hunt down specific enemies to farm pieces, and my available perks list was understandably slim because of it. That said, there was nothing sitting on a vendor’s shelf that made me think my odds of beating a nagging boss or a tough jumping puzzle would be greater if I did.
There’s quite a variety of different types of enemies to use all of this offense on, but you spend so much time in large zones that baddies turn from new challenges to nuisances pretty quickly. Enemies that you can’t simply whack to death at first sight are few and far between, and they’re rarely arranged in a way that makes them a real threat to your progress, the occasional archer standing on a platform you need to jump up to hit notwithstanding. Bosses on the whole don’t require much strategy outside of basic pattern recognition, either. A giant rooster mini-boss early on gave me an opportunity to use my air dash optimally just after unlocking it, but it wasn't until much later in the roughly 30-hour campaign that any big enemies forced an extra technical layer out of my combat strategy. And when the challenge did finally ramp up, it was completely over-tuned. The damage output exploded and the time between attacks shrank, turning some late game fights into frustrating walks of shame from the closest checkpoint to the boss.
The Buffy the Vampire Slayer franchise has a rich history in the comic book realm, with multiple publishers adding to the mythology of the classic TV series. Now Dynamite Entertainment has become the newest home for Buffy comics, with the publisher announcing a pair of interconnected titles - Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.
Both books will be written by Absolute Wonder Woman and Birds of Prey writer Kelly Thompson and feature cover art by David Nakayama. No interior artists have been revealed yet.
Little else is known about the new Buffy and Angel comics at this stage, other than that they'll follow the example of the original shows and feature a tightly intertwined continuity. Judging from Nakayama's art above, it would seem the books are set in the classic Buffy era rather than the time period of the upcoming Hulu revival series.
"In my early days trying to figure out how to be a writer and what stories mattered to me and why — no heroine quite broke through for me like Buffy Summers," said Thompson in a statement. "She was somehow everything my young geek heart had always wanted but hadn’t known to ask for. Something about that delicate alchemy of horror, fantasy, and comedy paired with a hero so pure of heart and yet flawed and relatable was… impossible to deny. I fell deeply in love with Buffy, and following that, her whole world. Her ex-boyfriend is now a supernatural detective in Los Angeles you say? Inject it directly into my veins! But unlike a lot of other worlds I loved, the world of Buffy and Angel somehow never fell to the wayside. I could always come back to it and find something new, or something I’d missed, or something I needed. And I hope this new story we’re telling can do the same for old and new fans everywhere.”
Editor Nate Cosby said, “There was one name on my wish list of writers for Buffy: Kelly Thompson. There was one name on my wish list of writers for Angel: Kelly Thompson. Her passion for these characters is second-to-none. The interweaving story she’s crafted for both books is going to knock everyone's socks off.”
Previously, both Dark Horse and BOOM! Studios held the rights to the Buffy franchise at different points. Dark Horse published Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8 and its sequels, continuing the continuity of the TV series with the involvement of creator Joss Whedon. BOOM!, meanwhile, published a 2019 reboot that acted as a sort of Ultimate Universe-inspired take on Buffy. It remains to be seen if Dynamite's Buffy comics will reflect the events of the Dark Horse books or act as an alternate sequel to the TV series.
Dynamite is teasing more news about the Buffy creative teams and release dates soon.
The Studio star Ike Barinholtz is reportedly set to play Elon Musk in Amazon’s Artificial, a movie about ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
The Hollywood Reporter said Barinholtz is in talks to play the X / Twitter and Tesla owner in Artificial, which also stars Spider-Man actor Andrew Garfield as OpenAI boss Sam Altman, and Anora actor Yura Borisov as OpenAI co-founder Iya Stuskever.
Artificial is directed by Luca Guadagnino, who recently directed After the Hunt, starring Julia Roberts, Garfield, and Ayo Edebiri. It hits theaters October 10. Guadagnino also directed last year’s Challengers, starring Zendaya.
Artificial will reportedly cover the dramatic firing and rehiring of Altman in 2023. Musk, an OpenAI co-founder, is ambroiled in a public spat with OpenAI over the way the business is run, and also has his own rival AI, Grok, built into X / Twitter.
According to a report by Variety, Artificial is described as a "comedic drama set in the world of artificial intelligence."
Photo by Robin L Marshall/Getty Images.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
“Here be monsters,” says the legend on so many antique maps, firing the imagination with thoughts of kraken, chimeras, or worse. But what if it were true? What if Lewis and Clarke, setting out on their expedition across the American interior, encountered buffalo-headed minotaurs and man-eating plants.
That’s the premise of the Corps of Discovery comic and now of this board game adaptation. The game comes from the same designers as the superb Mind MGMT, although, save for the comic book connection, this is a very different kind of game.
What’s in the Box
Most box-openings start with a board, and Corps of Discovery is no exception, but the nature of the board itself is rather surprising. Instead of the usual fold-out affair, you get a cardboard sandwich: two layers of card stuck together, with room in between to slip in a sheet of paper. The top layer is punctuated by a regular grid of circular holes, and the box contains an equally unusual supply of thick cardboard sun tokens with wide “pegs” that fit loosely into the grid's holes.
There are two folders of paper maps that slide into the sandwich, one for each of the two scenarios included in the game. There’s also a second board which is used for tracking the current game state, with spaces for three challenge cards, backpack items and water: this doubles as a handy reminder of the flow of each game day. There are tokens for the various resources that go in your backpack and for your water supply. There are also several card decks, not only the challenge cards that’ll outline the obstacles you must overcome each day, but also characters to play, items for them to use and so on.
As a scenario-based game, there are also additional cards and tokens applicable to particular scenarios. One thing to note is that, as a game based on a comic book series, all the components are furnished with excellent art from the original comics. While it might not be to everyone’s tastes, it does a fantastic job of bringing the game’s dangerous world to life, especially if you’re familiar with the source material.
Rules and How It Plays
Understanding how the game is set up is, unusually, an integral part of understanding how it plays. First, your group chooses one of the two scenarios to play (plus a training mission), and one of the 10 map sheets included for that scenario, covering it with a blank sheet so you can’t see what’s on it. You slip this, cover and all, into the cardboard-sandwich board then cover all the holes with the sun tokens. Then you slip out the blank sheet. The result is a game map that you know nothing about, ripe for exploration and discovery.
This is a cooperative game where you’re working together to map the wilderness and survive. On your individual turn, you simply remove a sun token, revealing an icon underneath, and take a matching resource to add to your collective backpack. There’s no piece to mark where you are on the map. Instead, movement is abstracted away under the presumption that it’s easy to move through already explored territory. The next player just removes a sun token next to any already-revealed space, although there are some mountainous areas on each map that you can’t traverse.
Exploration, however, is far from a random walk in the park. Each scenario has a set of rules about where and how the various different icons are laid out. In the Fauna scenario, for example, there’s always one wood icon per row and column, and there will always be a water icon orthogonally adjacent to each wood. Each mud icon will be next to a water and a stone, while forts always form an L-shape series with a water and a skull. There are more rules – and icons – but you get the idea.
This allows you to make predictions and deductions about what you’re going to encounter on the map. Sometimes you can figure it out with complete certainty, but more often it’s a bit of a gamble, where you can narrow down the odds without being sure. Exploration is thus both a fun puzzle where you can aim for specific resources, and an exercise loaded with tension. The rules are complex enough to make it a good group discussion, ensuring there’s a dynamic sense of cooperation, and something you can master with practice.
The rules are complex enough to make it a good group discussion, ensuring there’s a dynamic sense of cooperation, and something you can master with practice.
Each time you remove a sun token from the board you place it on one of three challenge cards dealt at the start of the game day. These cards have a resource requirement that you must spend in order to pass the challenge and a consequence for passing or failing, the latter of which usually means losing even more, different resources. You have to face these consequences once the card accumulates a certain number of suns, often only two or three. Considering many challenges require more than two or three resources to pass, this immediately puts your game under massive pressure to find the right icons on every turn.
If you run out of water tokens, you die. If you end the day – timing out the three challenge cards for that die – without any food tokens, you die. Monsters generally don’t kill you outright but sap these precious, precious resource tokens until you die. Even when you’re on top of the resource-mapping system, most games will go down to the wire of you gaining your objective with a few measly drops of water left in your canteen. The last few turns ramp up the tension to crushing levels, until it almost feels like you’re struggling through a real wilderness, desperately following signs of water in the hope of surviving just one more day.
As if this wasn’t enough, on top of surviving you also have a goal to complete. This depends on the scenario. In Fauna, for instance, you’ll meet those buffalo-headed minotaurs who’ll make it harder to traverse rows and columns until you find a fort, learn a recipe for killing one, and sacrifice the necessary resources, all of which you were probably hoping to save to pass a challenge card. These kinds of trade-offs are part of the game’s strategy: identifying times when failing a daily challenge can be a useful step in the wider goal of passing the winning objectives.
Other aspects of your decision-making come down to the characters in play and the gear you choose at the outset, all of which offer you special abilities to piece together and increase your chance of survival. You can plan ahead with these since you pick them yourself, look for combos, and build a strategy around them. But there are also destiny cards, random helpful bonuses that you can sometimes replenish by achieving in-game goals, and for these you’ll have to roll with whatever fate gives you, adjusting your tactics accordingly.
With practice and luck you will, eventually, manage to beat Fauna and, in time, the game’s second scenario, Flora, which involves a giant carnivorous plant. Corps of Discovery goes out of its way to make these scenarios replayable by offering such a huge range of map sheets – you can also download and print out more – that memorising the layouts is essentially impossible. Variety, however, cannot fully undermine human psychology: there’s an innate tendency to treat a mission as “done” once it’s been won. This is exacerbated by the game’s high difficulty level and lack of narrative detail. Although it does a great job of conjuring up the spectre of starving in the wilderness, the challenge cards feel pretty mechanical, so repeated tries at a scenario can feel a little same-y.
This isn’t quite the limiting factor it may sound like as it’ll take you repeated attempts to win both the scenarios, and there are expansions available which further the story and build considerably on the core mechanics – all four are included in the deluxe edition, which we used for the photos accompanying this review. But it still would have felt like a more complete experience if more of these elements had been included in the base game. As it stands, the game’s high toughness is the major motivation for a replay, and it’s almost enough by itself: winning against the odds, in a land where almost everything you encounter is out to kill you, is a hugely satisfying moment.
Google has announced the official launch date of its Google Pixel 10 lineup, and it's just around the corner.
According to media invites shared by Google, the Google Pixel 10 will launch on August 20. Google is expected to share more information about the phone alongside a collection of other Pixel devices, including new earbuds and watches, at its Made by Google event on the same day.
Google is officially showing the Pixel 10 already. Assuming this isn't a 10 Pro, looks like 3 cameras on the base phone is the main thing that's new. Otherwise... same design 🤓 pic.twitter.com/i3gF7Mshts
Unsurprisingly, the Google Pixel 10's launch comes almost exactly one year after the Pixel 9. And based on the brief showcase video on the device's Google Store page, it appears to share an identical design to the previous iteration, sporting the same rounded display and pill-based camera bump that defined that generation of the popular smartphone lineup.
Despite the similar look, leaks suggest the phone will come with the new Tensor G5 chip, a moderately larger battery, and a third camera. We're certainly eager to learn more about the differences between the standard and Pro models of the phone, too, as Google is known for pushing some of its most attractive features to its premium device.
Fans will also get a look at the Pixel 10 Pro Fold and Pixel Watch 4, both of which are set to be iterative devices rather than substantial updates—at least in terms of design. If you need new earbuds, you can expect a formal announcement of fresh Pixel Buds, too.
Google hasn't confirmed anything regarding pricing for the Pixel 10 family yet, so it's yet to be seen if ongoing tariffs will have a larger impact than usual on those looking to upgrade to the company's newest flagship series.
If you want to watch the announcements from the Made by Google event, you'll be able to livestream it on YouTube. The keynote, which will take place in New York, starts August 20 at 1 PM ET.
Connexion
PC Gamer
IGN
